In harvesting peanuts, the common procedure is to dig the peanuts up from the earth, convey the plants in an upwardly direction while simultaneously shaking the dirt therefrom and windrow or invert the plants for drying. The peanut plants comprise vines having peanuts attached thereto. Machines for accomplishing that type of peanut harvesting are called digger-shaker-windrowers or digger-shaker-inverters and usually comprise a plow that is pulled by a tractor beneath two adjacent peanut rows to uproot the plants and convey them to an inclined conveyor which elevates the plants. The plants are then allowed to fall from the upper end of the conveyor onto the ground, usually with the two adjacent rows of plants forming a windrow. If an inverter is utilized, the peanuts are oriented on the ground in a nuts-up attitude whereby they can be dried much easier and more quickly than in a random orientation of the nuts. Such inverters are exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 3,726,345, issued Apr. 10, 1973 to Harrell et al; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,734,194, issued May 22, 1973 to Whitfield.
After the nuts have been suitably dried, peanut combine machines are utilized to gather the peanut vines with the peanuts attached from the ground or windrows by a pickup means to separate the peanuts from the vines to which they are attached, to remove the stems from the peanuts, clean the peanuts and to discharge the peanuts into suitable containers. Typical combines are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,007,475, issued Nov. 7, 1961 to Long; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,404,517, issued Oct. 8, 1968 to Whitfield, et al.
The above described peanut process is expensive, time consuming and cumbersome in its utilization of a separate harvesting step allowing the peanuts to dry and then a separate combining step.
Additionally, the windrowing of the peanuts subjects them to rainfall which may cause undersirable mold growth or a total loss of the crop, birds and rodents often destroy part of the crop and the conventional combines frequently cause breaks and splits and allow easy access for mold and insect infestation.
In a paper entitled "Mechanisms for Picking Peanuts from Oriented Plants" by J. L. Butler, et al. for presentation at the Annual Meeting, American Peanut Research and Education Association, San Antonio, Texas, July 12-15, 1970, and published in the Journal, mechanisms were disclosed which picked freshly dug or "green" oriented peanuts and separated the vines from the peanut pods. The Butler et al. paper stated that directing the plants into a picking component immediately behind a digging component would help to eliminate having some peanuts become entangled with the vine mass.